The growth of the global cold chain radio frequency identification (RFID) market is driven by the government mandates for pharmaceutical delivery traceability, along with increasing focus on food safety in the developed countries of North America and Europe. However, the high installation and maintenance cost, along with complicated technology of RFID is hindering the growth of the RFID in cold chain market in the developing countries. RFID is used for complete tracking of goods and its temperature, during the entire supply chain process of the products. The lack of global standards, along with troubleshooting issues is hindering its wide scale adoption in cold chain.

Over the past few years, the emphasis on effective monitoring of the temperature sensitive products in cold chain has increased significantly, owing to the growth of organized food and beverages retail in developing countries. The increasing consumption of chilled and frozen goods in developing countries is expected to lay new market opportunities for cold chain RFID providers during the forecast period. The increased outsourcing of temperature-sensitive pharmaceuticals production, from developing countries has also boosted the growth of the cold chain RFID market in developing countries.

The technical advancement in RFID, such as fusions of sensors has extended its application in cold chain logistics services. The advanced RFID with sensors can trace the temperature of the product though out its storage and logistic period. RFID used in cold chain includes sensors, RFID tag and RFID readers. The RFID tags are expected to be the fastest growing segment in the global cold chain RFID market during the forecast period.

Asia-Pacific accounted for the largest cold chain capacity (in terms of volume) in 2015. Despite this, the cold chain RFID market in the region is fairly low, as compared to North America and Europe. Large parts of cold chain RFID deployment in developing countries are in empirical phase. Most of the cold chain service provider in these developing countries deploys RFID to fulfill retailers' requests and achieve food safety regulations. However with low profit margin, the cold chain vendors in developing countries are finding hard to generate return on investment, and hence the adoption of cold chain RFID was below its potential during 2012-2015.

North America accounted for the largest market of RFID in cold chain in 2015. The stringent government mandates, along with increased global trade of pharmaceuticals and food products have led to their market dominance. Europe has been the second largest market of RFID in cold chain, owing the open border cold chain logistics among the EU countries. The Asia-Pacific RFID in cold chain market is expected to grow with the fastest pace during the forecast period, owing to the growth of pharmaceuticals product manufacturing in China and India. The RFID in cold chain market in Latin America, Middle-East, and Africa is in nascent phase. Brazil is expected to be the important largest market of RFID in cold chain by 2022.